Different systems exist for allowing inquirers to interact with experts. As broadly used herein, an inquirer corresponds to any person (or entity) that poses a question. An expert corresponds to any person (or any entity) that possesses sufficient knowledge to provide an answer to the inquirer's question.
In one system, an inquirer can post a question to a network-accessible forum. An expert can visit the forum and respond to the question. The inquirer can then return to the forum at a later time to receive the expert's answer. This approach is not fully satisfactory because it requires the inquirer to manually identify an appropriate forum; it further requires the expert to manually seek out relevant questions. There is no assurance that the inquirer will find an appropriate forum or that an appropriate expert will discover the question within the forum. Further, there may be large spans of time separating key events in this system; this aspect makes it difficult to achieve a fluid interaction between inquirer and expert.
In another system, an inquirer may send a question via Email to a group of individuals identified by a mailing list. Any of the recipients may choose to respond to the Email message. This approach is not fully satisfactory because it potentially may send the question to a large group of people. This distribution may have the effect of disturbing more people than is necessary, as well as failing to narrowly target those people that are in the best position to answer the question. This approach may also result in the inquirer being deluged with too many answers, many of which may be duplicative or not otherwise useful.
In another system, an inquirer may send a question to a team of experts who are financially compensated to respond the question. This type of expert may perform a network search to generate an answer to the question and then send the answer to the inquirer. This approach may not be fully satisfactory because there is no assurance that the system will send the question to an expert who is a priori knowledgeable in the field to which the question pertains. Moreover, if this type of expert is simply performing a conventional Internet search, this approach may fail to convey information to the inquirer which she could not readily discover by herself.
The literature has recently proposed systems which attempt to automatically route questions to appropriate experts. These proposed approaches may address various shortcomings identified above, but these approaches may also not be fully satisfactory. For instance, these approaches may fail to manage the flow of information among inquirers and experts in an efficient manner.